Businesses, schools, hospitals, business districts, shopping centres, towns and whole cities are increasingly experiencing issues with vehicle congestion and parking. Some businesses have identified that some of their employees are spending up to an hour each morning attempting to find a parking space, with some employees being forced by lack of easy access to parking facilities to park so far from their place of work that they then need to take an additional bus journey to reach their place of employment. Public utilities such as hospitals and schools have reported that, come the morning rush hour, access to their premises often becomes blocked as large local traffic volumes reduces access to and from their parking areas. In many cases, the schools and hospitals have been forced to employ traffic marshals at the peak morning and afternoon traffic times in order to control the traffic and avoid traffic gridlock and other traffic related problems.
This has far reaching financial and human effects, both for the locus of these regular journeys and those undertaking the journeys, such as lost productivity, increased or additional costs to employers, schools, local authorities, etc., increased cost of transport for commuters, loss of quality of life and reduced safety.
Two of the key factors identified by employers and schools across the country as being able to help alleviate this issue are modal change and vehicle sharing. This includes encouraging people to walk, to cycle or to use public transport and, for those who still need to drive, to encourage multiple occupancy of vehicles, e.g. car sharing.
One of the key issues identified so far as retarding the promotion of car sharing schemes has been policing or authenticating the activity, i.e. proving that car sharing has or has not taken place. The lack of any easily implementable and secure schemes for verifying that car sharing has indeed taken place is currently a major factor in dissuading employer organisations from adopting and/or promoting car sharing schemes to their employees as alternatives to current travel habits. In the USA, where ‘High Occupancy Vehicle’ (HOV) lanes have been employed to promote car sharing for many years, commuters have been known to buy manikins to appear to be car sharing when they are not in fact doing so. This then forces transport authorities to invest in costly infra-red cameras to detect the presence, or absence, of another person in the vehicle other than the driver. Some existing schemes investigated in the UK use a system of passes that commuters display on the dashboard of the vehicle they travel in. However, as there is no easy way of uniquely tying a pass to a traveler at a time of travel, these are easily and frequently defrauded. Even when the parking authorities suspect that a vehicle is making use of a space reserved for car sharers without having been involved in a multiple occupancy journey there is little they can do to impose sanctions on the vehicle or its owner as there is no concrete evidence that no sharing took place.
Despite the current issues affecting the take up of car sharing schemes by both organisations and their employees, car sharing as an alternative to existing commuter transport mechanism is regarded very favourably by commuters as reducing the environmental impact of vehicle use, reducing congestion and reducing the costs of commuting. Consequently, it is envisaged that the provision of user friendly applications which enable commuters and their employers to implement car sharing would greatly promote the uptake of a car sharing scheme according to the invention.